White House unveils new tracking tool for heat-related illnesses

The Biden administration on Wednesday launched a new information system to map emergency medical services (EMS) responses to heat-related illness across the country.

The online dashboard is run by the Department of Health and Human Services in partnership with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The agencies said the system is meant to help public health officials ensure that outreach and medical aid reach the people who need it most during heat emergencies.

“Heat is no longer a silent killer. From coast-to-coast, communities are battling to keep people cool, safe and alive due to the growing impacts of the climate crisis,” Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. 

“The EMS HeatTracker is a powerful tool from the Biden-Harris Administration that brings actionable information to prioritize outreach and interventions, helping prevent heat-related illnesses and death and build resilience across the nation,” Becerra added.

The rollout comes as extreme summer heat is increasing in the United States. Climate projections indicate that extreme heat events will be more frequent and intense in coming decades.  

In addition to showing state and county-level heat-related EMS activations, the dashboard breaks down patient characteristics by age, race, gender and urbanicity so officials can see which populations experience heat-related health risks most severely.

According to the agencies, the tracker also provides national-level information on the number of heat-related EMS activations and the number of heat-related deaths among patients who were alive when medical officials arrived on the scene. 

The tracker does not include information for patient fatalities that occurred prior to EMS arrival on scene or fatalities with no EMS response, making it an underestimate of the number of heat-related deaths in the U.S. The data will be updated weekly and will be about two weeks behind real time. 

The new system unveiled Wednesday is not the only way the federal government tracks heat illness. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been collecting national data on heat-related illness from emergency departments since 2018.

The CDC’s portal tracks the rate of emergency department visits associated with heat-related illness and releases it daily, using data from electronic health records shared by participating medical facilities.